I like to leave comments on articles and blog posts I find interesting, and interact with the author. However, if the only option to leave a comment is through Facebook comments, I probably won't use it for the following reasons:

My professional persona is separate from my personal persona. I don't want my friends and family reading my comments on "How To Make A Two-Sided Business, One-Sided". It's not relevant for them, and I'd like to keep my feed clean of those messages.

I don't want people I interact with for business / professional reasons to view or connect to my Facebook profile. I have a linkedIn profile for those purposes.

I have no idea if the author is notified when I post using Facebook comments. One of the main reasons I comment on an article is to start a conversation with the author on the subject. If I can't tell if he's even notified, I probably won't bother.

I understand why people think adding Facebook comments will help drive traffic to their site. Perhaps in some contexts it makes sense, but if you were wondering why no one is commenting on your articles, consider if better engaging your readers is more important to you than polluting their social feed. Also - visitors might not even have a Facebook account, or they are not logged-in at the moment. Don't make this a barrier for engagement.

If people do feel they want to share your article on Facebook, use social sharing buttons, like the ones you see on this blog. Don't force commenting and sharing as a bundle package to readers.

Edit:

After reading and responding to the comments below, I understand it was not completely clear what my stance is. First, I'd like to make it clear I have nothing against Facebook, or its comment widget. I was questioning the appropriateness of having the comment widget on sites / blogs where I read for professional reasons, and would like to keep it separate from my personal Facebook profile.

Keep it separate doesn't mean just that my friends on Facebook will read it, but also whether other readers of the blog will have access to my Facebook profile, which I'd rather avoid.

In addition, I was writing the post from the viewpoint of a site visitor who's been frustrated by having no recourse other than using Facebook comments - not from the viewpoint of the publisher. Content publishers have their own objectives which might not align with mine, and it might be perfectly fine with them that I don't leave a comment on their site. There's nothing wrong with that.

To sum it up - if you care about people who want a separation between their Facebook profiles and their professional reading, you should think twice about using Facebook comments in your site.

Graphs and charts are a useful visual way to view historical data - they make it easier to detect trends and get a big-picture view of data. All we need is timestamped data - table rows that are stamped with a specific date/time format, that can be used to group rows into time periods.

Time stamped data

In order to aggregate table data by time periods / ranges, we need a date/time column in the table we want to analyze. Appropriate types for such a column include TIMESTAMP, DATETIME and DATE, but we can also use string / numeric types for grouping data together if they contain some sort of date/time information - though those will be much less flexible than native date/time types.

I usually opt to go with the TIMESTAMP format, for a couple of reasons - Read more »

PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments. The relative ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account for a traditional payment gateway is the number one reason, and another is the comprehensive API they provide for their payment services.

Foreclosure: The PayPal API is amongst the worst I've ever had to deal with - inconsistencies, sometimes poor and conflicting documentation, unpredictable failures and account changes and major differences between the live and sandbox versions all conspire to make working with the PayPal API quite a pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any better alternatives currently, so hopefully this guide will help ease the pain for some of you out there taking your lumps working the API into your applications.Read more »

First, a prelude - though I've mostly written technical articles on this blog, it's called techfounder for a reason - it was my original intention to also talk about startups from the view-point of the technical founder. I have been involved in several ventures so far in this role (currently at Binpress), each giving me more perspective on the overall picture.

I've just stumbled upon a nice article titled "Why you can('t) recruit a technical co-founder". The author makes some solid points about why it's hard to recruit / find a technical co-founder for a startup, but it seemed more common sense than deep introspection.

Idea is nothing, execution is everything

If you've started up your own venture, you know this saying is not just a cliche. Ideas, however great, will get nowhere without execution. On the other hand, solid and above execution can get very far with even below mediocre ideas.Read more »

I just saw an article on Smashing Magazine titled "Speeding up your website's database". I love Smashing's contribution to the webdev community, but their articles are getting longer and more basic at the same time.

I understand the need for simplicity because of the wide audience of Smashing Magazine, but I'd wish they'd give something more than the absolute basics you could find in almost any other site out there. I also didn't like some of the methods mentioned there for profiling (or the code itself), so I here is my starter guide to optimizing database performance.Read more »